I'm not prone to copy and paste other author's work, but since it's Turkey Day, and Phil and I sparring below, I figured what the hell.

Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican
By John Gray

Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards.

He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised.

All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employers medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now Joe gets it too.

He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

Joe takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo; his bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.

Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

He walks to the subway station for his government subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see, some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor to society.

Joe begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medicals benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some liberal didn’t think he should loose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

Its noon time, Joe needs to make a Bank Deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Republican Great Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten Mortgage and his below market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his life-time.

Joe is home from work, he plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to dads; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards.

He arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electricity until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.  

He is happy to see his dad who is now retired. His dad lives on Social Security and his union pension because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to. After his visit with dad he gets back in his car for the ride home.

He turns on a radio talk show, the host’s keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. Joe agrees, "We don’t need those big government liberals ruining our lives; after all, I’m a self made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have".

Happy Thanksgiving. You have a lot to be thankful for.

identification of the cause of those problems.

Somewhere though, TJ is smiling.

John arises at 5am, feeds his chickens and makes his coffee.

The water comes from a dug well out back that goes through a pH raiser followed by two particulate filters, a carbon filter and an ultraviolet sanitizer. His water contains no liberal-mandated chlorine, so it doesn't contain carcinogenic chloramines. It also contains no liberal-mandated fluorine; but his family doesn't get cavities because his diet is not what liberals recommend.

His friend lives in Waltham, MA where she spent three days puking her guts out because she accidentally made coffee using the tap water which, in spite of chlorine, had become contaminated with sewage. Thanks to liberals who made the water supply a government thing, his friend could not sue for lost wages.

John makes his breakfast which includes eggs from his free-ranging hens and bacon from his next door neighbor. Unlike the eggs approved by the USDA, his eggs contain no salmonella or e. coli. Furthermore, his bacon contains no liberal-mandated nitrites which turn into nitrosamines -- the same primary carcinogen as in cigarette smoke -- when put in contact with proteins.

Meanwhile, his friend in Waltham eats corn flakes which, due to a liberal-government-federal-preemption, do NOT have to disclose on their label that they are made with a Genetically Modified Organism -- in this case corn that produces an insecticide and has bacterial genes that alter its metabolism to make it immune to glyphosate. She puts milk on her corn flakes which is subsidized by the government and contains bovine growth hormone residues. Unfortunately, liberal Congressmen saw fit to not require this to be labeled either. She is suffering from a number of health complaints.

John, of course, takes NO medication because he is healthy as a horse. He knows the USDA guidelines specifying a grain-based diet for humans are bullshit, but he eats all naturally grown, raised and harvested food.

But he reflects on the new antibiotic production methods he pioneered and the fact they will never see the light of day because corrupted liberal government has made regulations that erect impossible hurdles. So people will die because his innovations will stay sitting in his safe. Fuck the world.

He drives to work in a car he bought himself, on roads he pays for with registration fees, gas taxes, income taxes, and property taxes out the wazoo. For that price, the fucking road OUGHT to be paved in gold and come with a free daily blowjob; but because the public servants are lazy good-for-nothings all the money has been goggled by fat hacks and he needs to get his front end aligned every three months due to pot holes and unrepaired road damage.

John has an insanely good education but even though he was born into destitute poverty, he never used a pell grant or guaranteed student loan. He earned scholarships of various sorts based strictly on academic merit; and paid the rest by working and saving.

John works for himself. He pays himself a decent living wage because he has earned it in the free market by being smarter, harder working, and more honest than his competitors. Unfortunately, because he has to pay lots of government mandates and recently had to pay someone to help unscramble the mandates for the new healthcare laws; he can't hire as many people as he'd like. However, because those who DO work for him are paid at 50% above industry average even WITHOUT any government mandates, he has no trouble retaining good help. Furthermore, because he pays the first $100k in employee medical expenses out of company profits, he is able to provide insurance for the remainder at about half of what most people pay -- making his employees very loyal. He hasn't had an employee quit in ... 4 years; though he HAS fired a couple. John is VERY worried he may have to cut back on benefits due to new liberal mandates. He hates it when the government forces him to be a tax collector or to fuck over employees.

It turns out that liberal mandates have a leveling effect. That is, they will force some scumbag to pay his wage slaves some minumum amount, but will make it so a guy who really gives a shit like John does has to pay less than he would otherwise pay.

John goes to the credit union to make a deposit. Credit unions were established by Distributists in response to Catholic social doctrine and are much better than banks who keep buying liberal Congressmen so they can charge you a $35 fee for being $1 overdrawn. John uses gold a lot because the value of his cash keeps declining in the face of a liberal-established Federal Reserve that has destroyed 95% of the value of the dollar in less than 100 years.

John's mortgage is also with the credit union and is a portfolio loan, with no connection to FNMA or Freddie. Unfortunately, liberal government mandates made mortgages ubiquitous which made housing prices rise at double the rate of inflation for decades, making it impossible to save enough to buy a house outright. Thus liberals turned most who wanted a home into debt-slaves for the wealthiest group in America -- bankers. This is no surprise given the amount that bankers contribute to liberal campaigns. But John has paid down his mortgage aggressively and expects to be debt free soon. John REALLY hates debt.

On his way to his father's house on poorly maintained roads, in a car that costs more than it should due to government mandated crap, John reflects on how cool the electric power plant is at his Dad's house. It is a combination one-cylinder diesel engine, home-made electric wind-turbine and photovoltaic system setup with multiple failover and counting amortized costs, only costs less than 10c per kwh to serve his Dad's home. John wonders why the liberal government thought it was a good idea to make so many rural people dependent on nameless faceless corporations who would ultimately use them as cash-cows for decades in a government-mandated monopoly.

On his way back home he turns on a radio invented by an evil dead white male and hears an NPR analyst opine at how John, just by being born, is an evil oppressor. He turns off the radio in disgust and is glad he is keeping his powder dry.

And everything you mention was passed with bipartisan support, with a lot of all this liberal stuff being done under the GOP.

You start the day with safe water.  Of course, the EPA was established under Nixon.  Nixon the old Liberal.

Yeah. Not too distorted.

Oh, yeah. You did mention Fanny Mae.  I really don't think that  is a good thing to bring up right now that we are bailing out Fanny and her brother Fred to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Detroit - He wakes up in a city that has been run by liberals for40 years, without one conservative voice on city government since the second World War.  He looks out the window and sees that of the 20 houses on the street, there are only two that are inhabited because everyone has left the city.  They are talking about bulldozing his entire block.  He thinks, "At least Bush lost New Orleans to a hurricaine.  We didn't even have a disaster."  

He looks at the paper and every single city service is going to be cut.  He would have gone to his job at GM, but the union made it so uncompetative, he has decided to learn Japanese so he can get a job at at Toyota plant in Arkansas.

San Fran - he wakes up in his expensive coop and goes to get the paper.  He is happy that the GOP has not had one person elected in SF in 45 years.  His front porch smells of piss and there is a used condom on the step.  A used needle is on the sidewalk. He is glad the city is going to give the Homeless a newspaper to sell so they can make money harrassing pedestrians.  He wonders why tourists no longer love SF as much as they used to.  He takes his paper back inside and has coffee reading about how SF will have to cut back on library services because the public employee pensions take up 15% of the city's budget and in two years will take up 20%, unless rich people move, leave fewer to tax, in which case city pensions will take up 25% of the budget.  They may have to close part of GOlden Gate Park.
The city has been reduced to very rich and very poor.  The middle class have fled and can no longer live in SF.

He is liberal, so he is happy to send his kids to private school, because he would not want to subject his kids to public school, which is for poor people who like living dangerously. But his kids go to a school where they won't have to rub elbows with dirty immigrants or other poor scum that do not know how to spell "arugula."

He wakes up and like his friend in SF sends his kid off to private school because the public school is hideous even though it get more federal money than anything he can think of.  Good thing that they stopped that scholarship program that sent that stupid poor kid to the school his kids go to with the Pres's kids.  Fortunately, everyone he knows works for the feds, so he doesn't care about anyone else.

mentioned. How about giving us one of what an 'ordinary citizen' is? Millions of your 'ordinary citizens' don't have much to be thankful for on this day, as they have no work to do, and they're about to get kicked out of their homes. Happy Thanksgiving anyway.

your stance as a GWB apologist gets tiresome. Hell-------I voted for BHO & am damned disappointed with his peformance so far. However, like FDR, BHO "inerited " a shitty hand"---------eceonomy on verge of collapse, U.S. involved in 2 needless wars that cause us to flush billions down the toilet, etc.

FDR also got a lousy hand from Hoover---when he took office in 1933, unemployment rate was at 25%. In my opinion, Hoover & GWB are among the worst 5 Presidnts in U.S. history.( along with such dems as Andrew Johnson & LBJ )

However, that doesn't let BHO off the hook----he's certainly bungled many things up to now. As I've said previously, I think last good POTUS was Eisenhower; all POTUS's since then, Dem & GOP have been gravely flawed, IMO.

What seperates us, Phil, is that you're so blindly partisan, always attacking Presidents of opposing party,but POTUS's of your party ( IE, GWB ) get a "pass".

& a Happy Thanksgiving to you------

Willy wakes up at 4am after a few hours sleep. Willy has suffered from terrible insomnia since he was a child, and so he trolls on over to the P&R board to see what's going on. He doesn't drink coffee because caffeine makes his insomnia far worse, and so he instead packs a bowl of some incredibly high quality herb.

Being too intoxicated to read, he gets up and considers making chocolate chip cookies for breakfast. He stares blankly at his KitchenAid mixer for 15 minutes before giving up on the idea, and decides to eat a banana instead.

He puts some water in a tea kettle to have some green tea. He filters the water twice because he knows that some conservative in the White House relaxed water standards to allow more jet fuel contaminents in his drinking water. He'd use bottled water produced by a for-profit company, but he suspects that the plastic bottles have their own carcenigens, and it most likely came from tap water anyway.

Willy considers eating some raisin bran with his banana, but then ponders why grain and corn is so cheap, and then remembers that "government is the shadow cast by business over society". This must somehow explain why high frutose corn syrup produced by a for-profit company makes Willy so  sick.  

Willy gets in his 10 year old car to head to work. His car has been giving him problems as of late. Willy wonders if they could build a gun that lasts hundreds of years without breaking, and build a rocket that can put a man on the moon, then couldn't for-profit car producers make a car that doesn't leak oil? Then he remembers that for-profit car producers do this on purpose, so the public is forced to continually purchase cars so they can keep making a profit.

The roads willy drives on are functional and nearly pot hole free. Willy notices that many of the roads have been repatched multiple times. Willy remembers something his dad, who worked in the road constuction industry, told him once. That for a little more money, an underlayment can be laid on the roads that will make them last 10 times longer, but such underlayment is rarely used because it would prevent for-profit road paving companies from getting repeat business.  

On his way into work on a publicly subsidized bus, Willy pulls out a used college chemistry textbook that he's been reading. Willy has no formal college education, because he didn't want to pay a for-profit institution to tell him what to think, and be enslaved to student loans for half his adult life. He knows that he could make more money in the private sector doing much of what he does now, but if for-profit business was intent on screwing Willy in order to gain his talent, knowledge, and skill, then he'd be just as happy to go into the public sector and work everyday to screw them back.

Willy also works for himself part time doing audio engineering work. It's a slowly dying industry because for-profit record companies conglomerated heavily in the last 15 years until there were only four for-profit companies left. These companies promised the public when compact discs were first sold that soon the prices would come down. That never happened, and they now sell those discs for $20 a piece, despite that it costs less than a dollar to produce. This caused the advent of digital music, much of which the public no longer has to pay for, putting endless studios and musicians out of business. Willy's just glad to be able to do what he loves from time to time for as long as it lasts.

It makes Willy think of his dad, who died of a stomach related form of cancer one month before he was set to retire. This makes Willy sad because his dad, who taught him to play guitar, never got to live long enough to see Willy become an audio engineer. Had Willy's dad lived in a place like Canada, where people go to the doctor as soon as they notice the slightest thing wrong with him, the cancer might have been caught in time. Luckily for Willy, his mom had decent health insurance that she got from her union. Without that, his mother would be paying off a half a million dollar debt to a for-profit hospital.  

Willy takes his lunch break out on a public bench in DC. Willy looks glum at his sandwich, which is made from wheat bread. Willy really wishes that he could have a sandwich on rye instead. Of course, Willy never buys rye bread, because every single loaf at the grocery store is made with high frutose corn syrup, a chemical Willy suspects contributed to his father's death.

Nearby a massive SUV pulls up on the side of the road. Willy can hear some for-profit right wing talk radio host ranting about how the free market always gives consumers what they want. Willy considers throwing his sandwich into the window of the SUV, but figures it would be better not to make tomorrow's papers.

How do you define them? What is it?

It appears branding like Nike, Reebok, etc.

Tea Party: Another scheme came up with smart marketeer to cash in on the niche and the half ass media that call itself News, Journalism picks it up and blows it up beyond comprehension so the Hula Hoop guy can make his fortune.

Somethings to think about after eating turkey.

Thank God the ordinary citizens are going about their work to keep the country going.

As a nation, we still have it really good, and have so much to be thankful for.  

In the height of the depression, shortly before Christmas, a bunch of workers put up a make shft tree on a construction cite in NYC.  Spirits have been lifted for decade at Rockefeller Center since then, with images of the tree broadcast nation wide every year.

When Americans were bogged down in the trenches in WW I, or the jungles of the Pacific in WW II, it was 1,000 times worse.

When the North and the South were killing each other by the ten thousand a day, it was worse.

When the Oakies were trucking into CA in 1930, it was far worse.

When unemployment is over 9% and Americans were held hostage in Iran, it was worse.

When the Twin Towers were still smoldering, and they were trying to dig out bits of bodies, it was worse.

There have always been terrible times.  But I can think of only one President who keeps telling people how he inherited such a terrible mess.

First, I did not "blindly" support Bush.  I disliked his comprehensive immigration reform. I did not like it when he nominated his legal counsel to the Court (old age, i forget her name).  I did not like his expansion of medicare for certain seniors, since I thought it was not necessary. (My mother in law is well off. THere is no need for her to be on "medical welfare.")

Next, only one line of the post was reference Obama.

Third, I have supported Obama on several occassions.  Most importantly, I supported him on some of his education positions, although others have been flawed.  

I forget the details now, but there were a couple "bickering" threads about things that all presidents do, and I said that the guy deserves a break.  

I find it funny that NOW Dems and kin are upset about "partisan" comments about Obama, when the hatred that Bush experienced was far worse.  

Bush would go to Crawford and people would write letters to the L.A. Times. He would exercise, and people wrote nasty letters asking why he wasn't working.  He chocked on a pretzel, and there were 1,000 theories that he was drunk.  The images of him morphing into Hitler, the terms "Nazi," dictator, etc.  It goes on and on.   My cousins - educated, otherwise smart people - wondered why he always had to fly around "in that damn plane."  (I told them AmTrack was sold out.  They didn't like that.)

I said then that no good would come of it.

Indeed, I wasn't even an "apologist" in this thread. I just point out that he got handed a horrific problem of an unprecedent nature.  I am no more an "aplogist" for him than I was for Licoln, FDR, or any other the others.  But tossing in any reference to Bush years, even without mentioning the name, blinds you to the gist of the majority of the post.

If people who were not for Obama are "partisan," it is the seeds partly sown by the left.  

Finally, I love the way that Obama inherited two "needless" wars.  In his own words, adopting a position that the Dems shouted from the roof tops, one was a "war of necessity."  If the other is "needless," why the fuck doesn't he just get out.  Wasn't it that other Dem who asked, "How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

At least Bush believed in it, even if he was wrong.  Obama lets people die for something he thinks is a mistake.

Happy Thanksgiving

Posted By: Priapus53

your stance as a GWB apologist gets tiresome. Hell-------I voted for BHO & am damned disappointed with his peformance so far. However, like FDR, BHO "inerited " a shitty hand"---------eceonomy on verge of collapse, U.S. involved in 2 needless wars that cause us to flush billions down the toilet, etc.

FDR also got a lousy hand from Hoover---when he took office in 1933, unemployment rate was at 25%. In my opinion, Hoover & GWB are among the worst 5 Presidnts in U.S. history.( along with such dems as Andrew Johnson & LBJ )

However, that doesn't let BHO off the hook----he's certainly bungled many things up to now. As I've said previously, I think last good POTUS was Eisenhower; all POTUS's since then, Dem & GOP have been gravely flawed, IMO.

What seperates us, Phil, is that you're so blindly partisan, always attacking Presidents of opposing party,but POTUS's of your party ( IE, GWB ) get a "pass".

& a Happy Thanksgiving to you------

All presidents are the same in that they are puppets of the capitalist class. A capitalist apparatchik such as you should know this well.